Prison for Young Killers Renews Debate on Saving Society's Lost

By DON TERRY

Published: January 31, 1996

CHICAGO, Jan. 30—
The little one is 12 years old, stands less than 5 feet tall and will be the youngest child locked up in a maximum-security juvenile prison in the country.

When he was 10, he dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse out of a 14th-floor window of a mean Chicago public housing development for refusing to steal candy for him. His I.Q. hovers below 60.

The older one, his partner in the murder, is also headed for prison, at age 13. He failed every subject in the fourth grade, including gym, but was passed into the fifth grade and was repeating it when he was arrested at 11. His father, who taught him how to fight when he was 6 or 7, is in prison for home invasion. The boy frequently ran away from home and slept in abandoned buildings. His I.Q. is 76.

The boys, whose names have not been made public because of their ages, must be freed by the time they turn 21.

Ignored, neglected and failed for most of their lives by parents, teachers and social workers, the two are now at the center of a national debate about how to handle the youngest of the bad. Together they have become the potent symbols of fear of a future overrun by cold-hearted child criminals.

At its core, the debate boils down to a question of how society can protect itself from its own lost children. Should they be locked up as if they were tiny adults, or should they be sent to secure residential treatment centers where they can get intensive counseling?

In state after state, including Illinois, the answer has been harsher punishment as laws have been changed to lower the age when a child or teen-ager can be sent to a juvenile prison or waived into the much harsher world of adult courts.

Jay Hoffman, a Democratic state legislator who helped push through a package of tougher Illinois juvenile justice laws in 1994, shortly after the two boys were arrested, said in an interview that such youngsters were more like "predators" and "hardened criminals" than children.

Before Eric Morse was killed, children under 13 in Illinois could not be sent to a juvenile prison. Afterwards, the law was quickly changed to make children as young as 10 eligible to be locked up. Juvenile prisons are similar to adult ones, but they hold far fewer inmates and provide for mandatory schooling.

"I think all of us agree that hardened criminals should be punished," Mr. Hoffman said. "If you do an adult crime, you should be treated like an adult criminal. That's my sense of what the public very much wants."

Dr. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who studies violence in children, agreed that juvenile criminals should be punished. But at the same time, he said, they must receive intensive psychiatric care and old-fashioned nurturing that most have never found in their homes.

Dr. Perry said the best place for such deeply troubled and violent children is in a well-secured residential treatment center, where there are fewer inmates, where more intensive rehabilitation therapy is available and where the staff generally is trained in counseling.

"There are places that have shown good success rates," he said. "It's not easy, and it's expensive. And because of that, much of the public considers such placements a waste of time and emotion. But do you want a child who was capable of terrible violence at a young age to be put into a cell, receive little or no intervention, and then simply be sent home five years later? I know I don't want to meet that child then."

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services said it could not find an appropriate residential center to take the boys, whom a spokeswoman described as "very disruptive" and involved in several fights while in a detention center since their arrest. The boy's lawyers said they found an out-of-state program willing to take them.

"He's not a monster," said David Hirschboeck, a public defender representing the 12-year-old. "I suppose some people will say he is. But one thing is certain now, we are barreling down the road to making him one."

Jack O'Malley, the Cook County State's Attorney, whose office prosecuted the boys, said he was confident the boys would receive adequate counseling at either a juvenile prison or a residential center. "But what particuarly concerns me is that these kids are going to get out," he said. "They're going to be very young men at that time. There is a tremendous responsibility to go to whatever lengths necessary to rehabilitate them. These two kids are as risky as they get."

In sentencing the boys to prison on Monday, the judge in the case, Carol Kelly of Cook County Juvenile Court, tried to balance treatment and punishment but tipped the scales toward punishment because, "these two held a 5-year-old out a window and then dropped him to a terrifying death."

Corrections officials assured the court that the necessary psychiatric services were available for the boys in juvenile prison. Still, Judge Kelly was taking no chances.

As part of the sentence, she said, the department must provide her within the next two months with a detailed treatment plan and full psychiatric evaluation of the boys. Eventually, she said, if they do well, they could be transferred to a residential treatment center.

But Michael Mahoney, executive director of the John Howard Association, which monitors the Cook County justice system, said he was worried that the boys would not receive the kind of treatment they need because the programs at juvenile prisons are limited, if they exist at all.

Both boys have been preyed on for most of their lives. They grew up in one of the city's roughest housing development, Ida B. Wells, where gangs, guns and death at an early age are part of everyday life.

Michelle Kaplan, the lawyer for the 13-year-old, said her client would probably end up in a medium-security prison with 263 inmates and one psychiatrist who only works a few hours a week.

"You cannot compare that with what he could get at a residential treatment facility," she said.

Ms. Kaplan said the boy had been ignored and failed by almost every adult in his life. He was passed through school even though he could barely read or write. He was picked up by the police several times for theft and disorderly conduct but never saw a social worker. His neighborhood was infested with violence.

"There's this history leading up to this child being in crisis, and no one has ever intervened," Ms. Kaplan said. "Now the system has finally intervened, and they want to throw him away. They're children. They're not animals."